The Prince of Shadow (2 page)

 

 

The two had not arrived in the camp together. Thebin, high in the mountains of the mainland, bred a short, sturdy people accustomed to the thin cold air of the heights. The children, if carefully trained in the richer atmosphere near the sea, had the breath to remain underwater for up to half an hour without surfacing to refill their lungs. To the ignorant, the skill was a sign that the children had magical powers born of a sea that the gods had raised higher than the mountains of Shan to make the door to heaven. Pearl ers knew the Thebins to be as human as any man, but with a skill for breathing that made them efficient at scooping pearl oysters out of the bay.

Llesho had come to Pearl Island in a shipment of Thebin children bought from Harn slave traders for training as divers. The boy had been seven summers in age then, with a dazed expression that soon marked him as soft in the head. He never spoke, and though he followed directions well enough, he could not even feed himself without being told to lift his spoon, and again, lift his spoon. From the start he walked the bay without fear, however, so Foreman Shen-shu considered him worth the effort to train.

Gradually, awareness of his surroundings had returned to Llesho's eyes. Then, one day he laughed at one of Lling's jokes, and his recovery from whatever had stunned his brain seemed complete. If he held his head at too arrogant a tilt or his eyes sometimes glittered with a light too hard and bleak for his youth, a joke or a curse would remind him of his place. Over time he passed out of notice, just another Thebin slave child with salt water in his hair and sand between his toes.

When Llesho reached the age of ten, Lleck appeared. Chin-shi had purchased the aging Thebin for his claims to understand the special ailments of the pearl divers. Lleck quickly made himself useful about the camp, tending to the needs not only of the Thebins, but of those Pearl Islanders willing to accept the advice of one who, it was whispered, had trained in the secret knowledge of eternal life to be found in the far mountains. From his first day in the camp, Lleck had taken a special interest in the boy Llesho, teaching him to read and write using a stick in the damp sand, and showing him the way of herbs in Thebin healing. Some felt that Llesho must pay for this attention with his body, but the longhouse offered no privacy, and pairings of every kind were both visible and audible to whoever had a bed nearby. No one had ever seen Lleck visit the boy Llesho in the dark, nor had Llesho ever been seen to make nighttime visits to Lleck.

The women, for the most part, felt that Lleck must be the boy's true father. Lleck, they reasoned, had followed his son into slavery to protect and raise the boy even at the cost of his own freedom. They admired such devotion of father and son, and while some grew jealous of the two, for the most part the connection between them remained hidden, one of the small conspiracies that all slave compounds nurture in defiance of their masters. And now, Lleck was dead. Kwan-ti remembered the arrogance and the bitterness that lay dormant at the heart of young Llesho, and a shudder of foreboding rippled through her. “Find your brothers.” What was the old man unleashing with his message? How could the boy, tied for life to the pearl beds and the island, obey his mentor's strange command?

At that very moment, Llesho had finished his half hour of rest in the pearl harvesting boat, and was returning to the bay for his next half hour in the water. Naked, as were all the pearl-divers, he sat on the red-painted deck of the harvest boat and snapped the iron shackles around his ankles. The collar chain that tethered him to the boat never came off during his quarter-shift, but the shackles around his ankles were his own choice. The extra weight helped to steady him when he walked the floor of the bay. At the end of his half-hour shift underwater, when he had not enough air in his lungs to swim to the surface under his own power, he would run the chain through the shackles and let the winch draw him up by his feet. On his first day in the bay Llesho had scorned the shackles, but he'd only needed to be dragged onto the boat by his neck once to realize the wisdom of using the ankle chain.

With the shackles in place, he stood at the edge of the boat and waited for the foreman to hand him the tool he would use this shift. A bag would mean he was collecting the oysters most likely to hide pearls, but this time Shen-shu handed him a muck rake. With the implement in his hand, he took one, two, three deep breaths, and stepped off the side of the boat. When his feet touched water, he raised his arms over his head, the rake held close to his side, and plunged like an arrow to the bottom of the bay. Lling was already there, staking out their piece of the oyster beds and protecting it from the encroaching teams that worked about them. She raked up the muck so that the nutrients filled the water with a roiling cloud. Hmishi followed after, landing almost on top of Lling's shoulders. Soon Llesho's two companions had turned the chore into a game of tridents, clashing their rakes together in mock battle while Llesho watched from just enough distance to set him apart from the game. Early in his training his watchful, quiet nature had earned him the fear and suspicion of his fellow slaves. But he spoke to the foreman and guards no more than he did to his fellow divers, and eventually they accepted the distance he kept as part of his personality. Better that than question the dark shadows in his eyes that occasionally blotted out the here and now. The growing acceptance of his fellow captives seemed to creep into Llesho's bones and make him over as a part of them.

The mock contest of trident-rakes stirred up as much of a silty cloud as if the combatants had applied themselves to their task with all the seriousness they showed when the foreman Shen-shu dove into the bay to check on them. Today, however, Shen-shu had worn a fresh white robe and shoes on his feet, a sure sign that the workers in the water below would have no surprise inspections on this quarter-shift. That left the Thebin slaves to their contest, and to the more difficult task of making Llesho laugh.

Hmishi had taken the offensive and tangled the teeth of his rake in those of the tool Lling flung about as a weapon. Lling lost control of her rake and waved her hand in submission for this round. Her eyes burned with the curses bursting to explode from her lips. Llesho winked, giving her the advantage in the second contest: he wanted to laugh, but fought the impulse for the same reasons Lling fought her desire to swear—they needed to conserve air, and Hmishi would not have heard them anyway through the bubbles they would release in the attempt.

Still struggling against the urge to laugh, Llesho turned away from the antics of his friends. He was shocked to see an old man drifting toward him over the low mounds of pearl oysters. The old man wore many layers of robes and gowns that floated about him like a school of multicolored fish. He had dark hair and clear blue eyes that reminded Llesho of a distant sky, as unlike the sky over Pearl Island as those blue eyes were unlike the hard white marbles of Lleck's cataracts. That he was Lleck, or some transformed apparition of Lleck, was certain, however, and Llesho gasped in horror.

The sudden breath should have killed him, since both he and the ghost were floating underwater. Instead of the terrifying pain of drowning, however, Llesho felt only crisp, clean air. Thinner than he had grown accustomed to at sea level, the breath that invigorated him reminded him of home—the mountains, the snow, the overwhelming cold. The spirit in the water drew closer, and Llesho shook his head, refusing to believe the truth this apparition forced upon him: Lleck was dead.

“Forgive me for leaving you, my prince.” The youthful spirit addressed him in Lleck's voice, using the title Llesho had not heard since the Harn had invaded Thebin and sold the princeling child into slavery. Llesho heard the words clearly, as if he stood on Thebin's high plateau, taking his lessons in the queen's garden and not among the sea creatures of the bay. He wondered if he, too, had passed into the kingdom of the dead.

“I had hoped to live to see you grown, to know that you had been returned to your rightful place. But age and fever have no respect for an old man's wishes.” Did the spirits of the dead feel remorse? It sounded as if the king's minister might, but Lleck was smiling at him, a wry acknowledgment that life and all its hopes and concerns were behind him now.

“I have no rightful place,” Llesho answered bitterly, his words as clear as the spirit's, and he felt no lack of air to argue further. “I am the last of an old and broken house, destined to die at the bottom of the bay.”

“Not the last,” Lleck told him. “Your father they killed, yes. But your brothers still live, carried into distant provinces and sold into slavery, each told the others had been slain.”

Since that described Llesho's own fate, he found his mentor's words difficult to deny. A new feeling kindled in his breast, so alien to his experience that Llesho did not recognize it for hope.

“My sister?” He could not look the spirit of the minister in the eye, for fear of what he would see there. As a small and spoiled prince he had hated Ping, the infant who had taken his place in his mother's lap. When Llesho was five, he had created an uproar in the court by stealing out of the Palace of the Sun with the intent, he informed the gatekeeper, of setting the newborn princess on the mountainside as a gift for the gods. When the guard had advised him that tigers were more common than gods on the mountain, Llesho had informed him that a tiger would do. Ping had been two years old when the invasion had come, of little use to the Harn as a slave or a hostage. With the wisdom that comes of being fifteen, however, Llesho would have given his life to keep her safe.

Lleck-the-spirit shook his head. “Beaten, and thrown on the rubbish heap is what I heard,” he said, “I do not find her spirit in the kingdom of the dead, but I know not in what shape or country she has been reborn.”

It was an old grief, but Llesho found it could still hurt, and the more because he had in that same moment learned to hope. “My mother?”

Again Lleck-the-spirit shook his head, but his brow creased in some question. “Your mother, the queen, is not among the spirits of the dead,” he said. “She was taken in the raid that killed your father, but no report of her came to me after. They say that she ascended into heaven as a living being to beg the mercy of the gods on her country, but that her beauty so entranced the heavenly creatures that they would not let her depart again.

“I think this is good storytelling, but bad history. If she has not crossed into a new life, she must be a prisoner still.”

Llesho said nothing. He was far too old to cry about his dead, had never given his enemies that satisfaction even as a small child.

“Find your brothers, Llesho,” the spirit pleaded with him. “Save Thebin. The land itself is dying, and the few of her people who remain are dying with her.” Sorrow ran from Lleck's dead eyes, salt tears returning to the salty bay. “I would have stood at your side if I could. Now, I have only this to offer—” The spirit held out to him a pearl as big as a walnut and as black as Foreman Shen-shu's eyes. “The pearl has magical properties of long life and various protections. Keep it with you, but use it only at most dire need.”

At this, Llesho wondered if the spirit in front of him was not Lleck after all, but an imp sent to trick him into witchcraft. “A good trick,” he taunted the spirit, “but Lleck would know that I can't possibly carry a pearl out of the bay—I have no place to hide it.” He gestured to his own naked body. “And Foreman Shen-shu will search the cavities of our bodies for stolen treasure with as much vigilance today as he does after every quarter shift in the pearl beds. As for swallowing a pearl that big, if it were possible to do so without choking to death, even Lord Chin-shi's guards would notice a slave from the pearl bay searching through the privy trench!”

“Have some trust, young prince.”

The reminder of his former state from the lips of his teacher's spirit raised tears that stung the corners of Llesho's eyes, but he refused to shed them. He found little to trust in a world that had taken this last and only comfort from him. “How can I trust what you say, old man?” In the pain of his heartache, Llesho knew only to attack its source. “You said you would stay with me, and protect me. Now you are dead, and if we are truly having this conversation at all, I must be dying as well!”

Lling and Hmishi had long since tugged on their chains and returned to the surface. Llesho knew he could have no air left in his lungs, could not breathe or speak underwater, and yet he did have air, was both breathing and speaking. Surely, he must be dead, or in that stage of drowning when the mind plays tricks on the body.

“Trust,” the old man said, with tears glittering in his eyes. He put one ghostly hand on Llesho's neck and with the other hand he held up the black pearl. Using thumb and forefinger, he squeezed the pearl until it was no larger than a tooth.

“Open,” he instructed, and when Llesho opened his mouth, Lleck popped the pearl into the empty socket where Llesho had lost a back tooth. “You should have that seen to one of these days,” he said, and then he disappeared, like a cloud dispersing in the water.

Watching the cloud spin away in eddies of disturbed currents, Llesho's mouth was suddenly filled with all the things he wanted to say to the old man, all the words of gratitude and love that he had taken for granted all the years of their captivity together.

“Come back,” he cried, but only bubbles formed in the water around him, and he realized that his lungs were ready to burst, and that his fingers had gotten clumsy. Somewhere he had dropped his rake, but he could not see it in the swirling muck. He struggled against panic and his own awkwardness to link the neck chain to his ankles, and tugged, hard, to alert the slave at the winch to pull him up. He would have given a sigh of relief when he felt the slack tighten and his body turn upside down, but to vent his emotion now would invite death at the very moment of his rescue. Then he was out of the water, hanging naked and upside down above the boat, coughing and choking, sneezing to clear the water from his nose.